The Double Bind

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LAUREL HADN’T FOCUSED on Serena at Bobbie’s funeral the week before, and they’d chatted only long enough to reconnect and set up a date for lunch.

When Laurel saw her on Friday, Serena looked older than she would have expected, but the once homeless teenager looked healthier, too. Serena was already at the restaurant when Laurel arrived, a bistro on the waterfront not far from the diner where she worked. She was seated at a table that faced the ferry dock, and one of the large boats had just drifted into the slip from the New York side of the lake. The passengers-mostly tourists-were streaming into the midday autumn sun. The boat was big, but there were so many people disembarking that it nevertheless reminded Laurel of the clown cars at the circus.

Serena’s eyes were the vibrant blue that Laurel recalled, but her cheekbones had disappeared into a face that had softened and grown round. Her hair still cascaded over her shoulders, but at some point Serena had made it a shade or two blonder than Laurel remembered. When Serena saw her, she raised her eyebrows in recognition, stood halfway up, and gave her a small salute from her chair. The young woman’s pink T-shirt fell to the base of her ribs, and she had a glistening stud in her naval that emerged from a small rope of flesh like a rivet on jeans. She was wearing a pair of thin silver hoops in her ears, each of which was the size of a bracelet.

“We go years without seeing each other, and now twice in two weeks,” Serena said.

Laurel had brought along the eight-by-ten photographs of Serena she’d taken years earlier, and she pulled them from her bag soon after they’d taken their seats. “I have a surprise for you,” she said, and she watched Serena’s eyes grow wide as she began to study the images.

“I was this close to the edge. Man, heroin chic was never a good look on me,” Serena murmured, shaking her head in slight disbelief. Then-afraid that she had hurt Laurel ’s feelings-she added quickly, “I mean, they’re great photos. I just look kind of scary. You know?”

“I do know. Heroin chic isn’t a good look on anybody,” Laurel answered.

“Can I keep these?”

“That’s why I brought them.”

“Thank you. Someday I’ll show these to my kids to scare them straight. Then again, I might not. Who wants to see their mother looking like this?”

“You were in a bad place and it wasn’t your fault. You landed on your feet.”

She rolled her eyes. “I got lucky. My aunt moved back and took me in. Now I have to find a place of my own. It’s time.”

It dawned on Laurel that she didn’t know if this aunt with whom Serena was living was her mother’s or her father’s sister, but since her mother had disappeared when Serena was so young Laurel had a feeling the woman had to be related to her dad. And so she asked Serena if she ever saw her father or spoke to him.

“No, he keeps his distance. And my aunt keeps us apart. She knows her brother’s a creep. One time he sent me a check. I wasn’t going to cash it, but my aunt said I should. And so I tried. It bounced. Another time he showed up uninvited-and drunk-at Easter, but there was a big group of us at my aunt’s, and even wasted he could see he wasn’t wanted. So he split. But he knows where I work and where I live. He’ll appear again.”

Serena watched the two waitresses chatting at the bar while they waited and smiled. “Man, if I gave service like this, I’d be fired.”

Eventually, one of waitresses greeted them, and Laurel ordered a garden salad and a diet soda. She was still feeling the weight of the massive breakfast she’d eaten.

“How fresh is your curried egg salad?” asked Serena.

“Very,” smiled the waitress, a rail of a girl who seemed too young to work there, and Serena agreed to give it a try.

They were surrounded by businessmen and women whose offices looked out on the lake, and tourists who were visiting Burlington. The two of them talked about their jobs, and Serena told Laurel about her boyfriend. She was dating a guy who worked the night shift at the ice cream factory in Waterbury, but had just applied for a position in the marketing department. Serena thought he had a shot because he was sharp and the company was more interested in good ideas than whether someone had a college degree-and, apparently, he had a lot of experience with ice cream. Laurel described her relationship with David, and wasn’t completely surprised when Serena remarked, “It’s kind of casual, huh?” Laurel thought she sounded disappointed for her.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s kind of casual.”

Finally, Laurel brought up Bobbie Crocker, and told Serena how he had died with snapshots of the country club where she had spent a large part of her youth in his possession, and how she believed he had grown up a child of plenty in a mansion just across the cove. Laurel asked her to recount the story of how she had found him.

“It was real clear he didn’t have a place to go,” Serena said. “I mean, he was supposed to be somewhere. The hospital doesn’t just open the door and say, ‘Fly, little bird, fly.’ I’ve lived in Waterbury long enough to know there’s always a plan for the patients. He was supposed to go someplace. He was supposed to be with someone. But he couldn’t tell me where or with who. Or he wouldn’t. Who knows? He couldn’t even tell me how he’d gotten to Burlington. A bus? Hitchhiked? Beats me. The thing is, with a lot of these people it only takes the slightest wobble and they fall off the horse. They stop taking their meds. But I liked him a lot, and I thought with a little help he could probably get along on his own. I didn’t guess he needed the hospital anymore. Not really. He wasn’t a danger to anyone. That’s why I brought him to BEDS. I talk to enough troopers and sheriffs at the diner to know that’s all they would have done.” She leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands behind her head.

“What did you like about him?” Laurel asked.

“Oh, he was very kind. I mean, he kept wanting to help me. It was, of course, a little insane.”

“How so?”

“Well, he offered to make phone calls to the presidents of record labels. I told him I didn’t sing, but that didn’t matter. He went on and on about all the record-label presidents he knew who owed him favors, and how he could get me a recording contract with a single phone call. Why was he doing this? Well, because I gave him extra coleslaw. And then seconds for free. That’s it. I mean, this old man comes in and he has barely enough money for a grilled cheese! And, you know, he was very funny-despite the fact he had to have been starving. He strolls in that night telling me knock-knock jokes about homeless people, and how many homeless it takes to screw in a lightbulb. And because he had, like, no money, he kept giving me advice as a tip. ‘Here’s a tip,’ he would say. ‘One good turn gets most of the blanket.’ It was corny, but sweet. Unfortunately, he just wouldn’t tell me where he was supposed to be. That’s the thing. I have no idea where he’d been sleeping before he wound up on the street.”

“You’re right,” Laurel said. “There had to be someplace between the hospital and BEDS. Obviously, they released him to someone besides us.”

Serena shrugged. “I kept asking him where he lived. And he finally rubbed his eyes really hard-like a little kid, you know, using his fists-and said he was pretty sure he was going to sleep that night where he’d slept the night before.”

“And that was?”

“The boiler room of that hotel just up the hill. That’s a ridiculous place for someone to end up. I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but I didn’t want him to spend another night in that room.”

The waitress returned with their drinks and momentarily they both grew quiet. Laurel watched Serena wrestle her straw free of its paper.

“So, you brought him to us,” she said.

“Yup. And he didn’t mind at all. You hear all about homeless people being real resistant to coming in off the street-hey, look at what I was like-but he was happy as a clam.”

“Did he understand where you were taking him?”

“He did. He just wanted a little assurance that no one would take his bag from him. I asked him what was in it that was so important, and he said his pictures.”

“When did you see him next?”

“Oh, I didn’t see him a whole lot before he died. Once his caseworker-a woman named Emily, you probably know her-brought him by the diner so he could thank me. She’s very nice. And another time I saw him at that candle vigil you do on Church Street just before Christmas. You know, the march where you say the names of the homeless?”

Laurel smiled. “You were there? I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”

“Yeah, I was in the crowd. I was too shy to say a name in the church, but I had my candle and I marched. Hell, look what you did for me.”

“As I recall, you spent about a week and a half at the shelter. We really didn’t do all that much.”

“But it was a week and a half when I really needed a place,” Serena said adamantly, meeting Laurel ’s eyes with an intensity that surprised her.

“Did Bobbie ever tell you anything about his sister?”

“His sister? I didn’t even know he had a sister.”

She nodded.

“I didn’t see her at the funeral. Is she alive?”

“She is.”

“You know her?”

“A bit. I met her last week.”

“Is she a little wacky, too?”

Laurel thought about this briefly before responding. “No, she’s not. At least not like Bobbie. She’s actually pretty nasty.”

“I guess she and Bobbie weren’t real close.”

“No, they weren’t. He ever mention any family at all?”

“Not a word,” Serena said, and her voice grew solemn, as if she were trying to conjure in her mind a family for Bobbie Crocker. “Not a single word.”

“What about that first night he came into the diner? Think back. When you were asking him if he had a place to go, what else did he say?”

Their food arrived, and Laurel could see that Serena was contemplating that August night when Bobbie had appeared at the counter with his duffel and a pocketful of change.

“Let me think,” she murmured. Her egg salad was orange with curry and sat like a globe on a palm-shaped leaf of iceberg lettuce. “You know, he did say one thing that might be important.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He said something about a guy he’d worked with at a magazine somewhere. Name was…Reese.”

“Was that his first name or his last?”

“I don’t know if he told me. But something about it is on the tip of my tongue.”

“Tell me.”

“This was, like, a year ago.”

“I know,” Laurel said, hoping she sounded patient.

“I’m going to say Reese was his first name. And…”

“And?”

“And you know what? He might have been living at Reese’s. After the hospital. That might be it.”

“Why would he have left?”

Serena was chewing the egg salad carefully. “They don’t put celery in it. We do. You have to have celery in your egg salad.”

“I agree,” she said politely. “Why do you think Bobbie moved out?”

“Maybe he was kicked out.”

“Bobbie kicked out? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Oh, not kicked out because he was a bad roomie or whatever. Maybe kicked out because he wasn’t helping with his share of the rent.”

“He would have been eighty years old! How much help could this Reese person have expected-especially if Bobbie came to him straight from the hospital?”

“People are cruel,” Serena said offhandedly. “You know that, Laurel.”

“But Bobbie was…old.”

She leaned forward in her chair, her chin over her plate. Her eyes grew wide and her words were soft but angry: “Old doesn’t matter. My dad shows up at my house when he’s eighty? I got a choice of giving him a room or letting him chill on the street? I can’t see me opening my doors. And I don’t think I’m a bad person. But cruel is as cruel does. Or whatever.”

Laurel thought about this. “I’m sure Bobbie never did anything to hurt Reese-at least not the way your father abused you.”

“I agree. I’m just saying, we don’t know. I think if you want to get the answer for sure, you got to find this Reese person.”

“Bobbie give any hints where he-”

“Or she. I keep saying he, but for all we know Reese could be a she.”

“Or she might live?”

“I’d start in Burlington -or the suburbs. Maybe Bobbie got from Waterbury to Burlington before he was homeless. Maybe he was released into the care of someone who lives around here.”

“That would be an irony.”

“Hey,” Serena said, studying a pair of beautiful young women their age in miniskirts-young public relations executives, Laurel guessed. “Life is all about irony. Irony and luck and…advantages. Why did I get a mom who lit out at first light and a dad who thought my head was a punching bag? Why did those two over there get parents who made sure they did their homework and then sent them to college? I’m not bitter. Really, I’m not. But I also know life isn’t always fair-and I have a feeling, my friend, that you know that just as well as I do.”

LAUREL LEFT WORK promptly at five that day, despite the reality that she had gotten so little done. But she wanted to get to the library in Burlington before the reference desk closed at six, because she was keenly interested in making a dent into the microfilms there or the hard copies of the old Life magazines.

The library only had bound volumes dating back to 1975, but it had microfilm all the way back to 1936. She was thrilled, and with an eager librarian’s help randomly selected a spool from 1960. Then she sat down at a carrel and began to scroll through images that ranged from a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to Charles de Gaulle boasting of the detonation of his country’s first nuclear bomb. She saw David Ben-Gurion and Nikita Khrushchev and an American U-2 reconnaissance plane. And there was a story about a fellow named Caryl Chessman, a man Laurel had never heard of but whose face gave her the chills because he was going to be executed for kidnapping and sexually assaulting two women a decade earlier. It sounded, based on the article, like he might have been innocent.

She tried to slide past the ads, but they were hypnotic: the mild cigarettes touted by singers and actors, the Air Force bombers used to sell automotive motor oil, the recipes that anchored the ads for canned soups and cake mixes and containers of Borden’s cottage cheese.

And, always, she squinted at the small type that occasionally-but only occasionally-ran up the sides or underneath the photos. Much to her disappointment, only a small fraction of the images actually had photo credits. She was probably up to May and almost out of time for the day when she discovered why. There, toward the front of the magazine, was a long, slender masthead rich with names, including the editors and the writers and the photographers.

And there he was: not Bobbie Crocker or Robert Buchanan. That would have sent her spinning like a top in her seat in her carrel. Instead, she saw what seemed to her at the moment to be the next best thing. Above a paragraph-long block of thirty photographers, an alphabetized litany that included Margaret Bourke-White and Cornell Capa and Alfred Eisenstaedt, was an assistant picture editor with the name of Marcus Gregory Reese.

BEFORE LEAVING the library, Laurel printed out the masthead so she would have the full list of names, and then she checked the Burlington phone book to find a phone number for Marcus Reese. He wasn’t listed. Nor was he in the Waterbury, Middlebury, or Montpelier areas. Then she went to the newspaper offices, a mere two blocks farther west on College Street. She was supposed to meet David at the movie theater at 6:45, but she was excited by what she had found and wanted to show him the copy of the masthead she had made.

He was on the phone in his office when she arrived, but it was apparent that the call was winding down, and so she slipped the masthead atop an unruly pile of papers on his desk and pointed at the photography staff. He nodded politely, but it was clear that the name Marcus Gregory Reese meant nothing to him. Only then did she realize there was no reason why it would. He didn’t know yet what she did; he hadn’t been with her when she’d had lunch with Serena. And so the moment he hung up she shared with him all that Serena had told her.

“Son of a gun,” he murmured.

“I couldn’t find Reese in the phone book, but I figured I’d Google him. And I want to use those research services you subscribe to here at the newspaper. Now that we have Bobbie’s Social Security number, let’s see what we can find.”

“We? Weren’t we going to a movie?”

Laurel paused. “This won’t take long.”

“It’ll keep,” he said, rising from his chair. “We should scoot.”

“Let me do this,” she said, blurting out the short sentence with a manic intensity that caught them both off guard.

For a moment, David said nothing. Then: “ Laurel, let it go for the night. Lighten up.”

“It’s important,” she said, unable to soften her tone.

“To whom?”

“To me. It’s important to me. I would think that would be enough.”

He looked at her carefully. Their relationship was so completely void of emotional intensity that she didn’t believe either of them had ever scolded the other. “Be my guest,” he said, though it was clear that he would have preferred that she wait till tomorrow. Nevertheless, he motioned toward his chair and his computer.

“Really, this will just take a second,” she continued. “Aren’t you curious?”

“I am curious. Not obsessed.”

“Well, I’m not obsessed, either. I simply want to find this Reese so I can call him. I want to ask him why he kicked Bobbie out-or why Bobbie chose to leave on his own.”

“Maybe he just died,” David said, unable-or unwilling-to hide the exasperation in his voice.

“Reese?”

He nodded. “It could be just that simple. The man died, and Bobbie went back to the streets. Tell you what: You Google Reese and see what comes up, and I’ll go check the obits. What month last year was Bobbie brought into BEDS?”

“August.”

“Fine. I’ll look through last summer.”

Laurel had the sense that he was making the offer both because he felt badly for being short with her, and because he still hadn’t done his promised LexisNexis search on a car accident involving Robert Buchanan. Nevertheless, she was grateful for his help.

RIGHT AWAY they learned two things: There was a sizable number of sites on the Web where Reese’s name appeared, and-exactly as David had suggested-the old photo editor had passed away fourteen months ago, in July of the previous year. David returned with the obituary that appeared in the newspaper, while she found a series of shorter obits online. She read the clipping about his death at David’s desk, while David stood beside her, pleased with what he had discovered.

MARCUS GREGORY REESE

BARTLETT -Marcus Gregory Reese, 83, died unexpectedly on July 18, at his home in Bartlett. Marcus-who used his full name professionally but was always called “Reese” by his friends-was born in Riverdale, N.Y. but moved to Bartlett after he retired from a distinguished career as a photographer and editor with a list of esteemed newspapers and magazines.

Reese was born on March 20, the youngest of Andrew and Amy Reese’s five children. After graduating from Riverdale High School, he enlisted in the United States Navy, where he served with honor as a seaman in the Pacific theater in the Second World War. When he returned to the United States he took his interest in photography and turned it into a career, shooting pictures first for the Newark Star-Ledger, then for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and finally for Life magazine-where he served also as a photo editor for almost thirty years.

Along the way he married twice. His first marriage, to Joyce McKenna, ended in divorce; his second, to Marjorie Ferris, ended when Marjorie died of cancer in 1999.

Reese is survived by an older sister, Mindy Reese Bucknell, in Clearwater, Fl.

A mass of Christian burial will be celebrated Wednesday, July 21 at 11 a.m. at the Bartlett Congregational Church, with interment to follow in the New Calvary Cemetery.

Arrangements were made by the Bedard McClure Funeral Home.

The fellow in the photo looked closer to sixty than eighty-three, so Laurel presumed it was an old picture. In it, Reese was a heavyset man with wild eyebrows and wavy white hair, and a chin that slid without interruption into a neck the size of a log. He was wearing tinted eyeglasses and a crewneck sweater with an Oxford button-down shirt, and he was grinning at the camera in a manner that could only be called rakish. Perhaps even smug.

David smiled grimly when they had finished reading the obituary. “I’ve always loved that phrasing: ‘Died unexpectedly.’ How unexpected can death be at eighty-three?”

“It always sounds like someone was murdered or killed himself, doesn’t it? Or some doctor made a howling error.”

He sat on the edge of the credenza behind his desk. “Heart attack, probably. Nothing mysterious, I imagine.”

She presumed he was right, but said nothing. In large measure because of her meeting with Pamela Marshfield and the lawyer’s phone call to BEDS, she was primed to see mystery everywhere.

“And I think we now know where your Mr. Crocker got those photographs,” he continued, his chin in his hands.

“What do you mean?”

“He probably took them from this Reese fellow. From what you tell me, Bobbie wasn’t exactly a paragon of mental health.”

“You think he stole them?” she asked, astonished by the very notion.

“First of all, I didn’t say steal. That implies too much mental competence. All I’m saying is that maybe he…commandeered them. Maybe after Reese died.”

“I think that’s still stealing.”

“Okay, then: He stole them. Or, perhaps, this Marcus Gregory Reese gave them to him.”

“But why would you think that?”

“Because neither of us saw Bobbie’s name on the Life masthead.”

“That doesn’t mean he didn’t take the pictures!”

“ Laurel, the obit said Reese was a photographer,” he insisted, cutting her off, and then he motioned at the computer monitor on his desk that showed the Web sites she had found with Reese’s name. “And look there: That site is all about Reese’s photography. And so’s that one. And that one. I wouldn’t be surprised if you actually find that Hula-Hoop image or one of Muddy Waters with Reese’s name as the credit.”

It was possible, she thought, but there was a missing step in his reasoning. She tried to remain calm, to not become defensive. Eventually, it came to her.

“We’re presuming that Bobbie did live with Reese,” she said slowly.

“Yes.”

“And that he was living with him because the state hospital had released him into Reese’s care.”

“Agreed.”

“And that they knew each other because they had worked together at the magazine. That’s what Serena told me, remember? It seems to me, Bobbie came to Vermont because he knew that Reese lived here. I only looked at one year of Life. Nineteen sixty. Maybe Bobbie worked for Life in the mid-fifties or the mid-sixties. Maybe when I have more time at the library, I’ll find whole years of Life magazines with Bobbie Crocker’s name on the masthead.”

“And so you’re suggesting that Bobbie knew Reese because Reese was his editor.”

“Am I vindicated?” she asked.

“No. That’s a big leap. They could have known each other at the magazine in a thousand ways that had nothing to do with Reese being his editor. Even if the two men did meet at Life, for all we know Bobbie was the custodian. Or the security guard. Or the elevator man. Years ago, they did have elevator men, you know.”

“I should check 1964-the issues of Life magazine from 1964. The other night I developed some pictures from the 1964 World’s Fair. I might find Bobbie’s name there.”

David nodded carefully, the way a father might at his child when he is on the verge of exasperation. Then he rose from the credenza, reached for the mouse, and started clicking the boxed Xs in the upper-right-hand corner of his monitor to log off. He had already clicked off the browser before Laurel was able to stop him, but he hadn’t yet begun to shut down the computer. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m getting us out the door so we don’t miss our movie. We need to leave now if we have any chance at all of getting there before it starts. Incidentally, I have something very funny to tell you about Marissa. She wants you to take her headshot. Can you imagine?”

He said more, but she was no longer focusing. With the browser disconnected she couldn’t see the summaries of the pages and pages about Marcus Gregory Reese and, almost as if she were an addict, she had to. Physically. She didn’t want to see them; she needed to see them. And so, even though she understood that he was trying to get the two of them out the door and was starting to tell her something about his daughter, she clicked back on the icon for Internet Explorer.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Can’t we just go to the next show? There must be a nine o’clock.”

“ Laurel!”

“If you really want to go, you can go. That’s fine. I can meet you for dinner afterward.”

“I don’t want to go to a movie alone on a Friday night. I want to go out on a date with my girlfriend. This is no small distinction.”

She went to the computer’s history of the sites it had visited that day, and returned to the Google results for Reese. “I can’t stop right now,” she said, and her voice was so halting and soft that she didn’t recognize it as her own. “I know I’m getting close.”

“Let me make absolutely sure I understand this: You want to spend your Friday night at my desk scrolling through sites about a dead photo editor from Life magazine. Is that accurate, Laurel?”

“Not all of Friday night. Just give me half an hour. Okay? Then we can go to dinner or we can go back to your apartment. Whatever you want. I just don’t want to leave now. I…can’t. And…”

“Yes?”

“And those research services for reporters. Can you show me one? Please? Just so we can see what we can learn from Bobbie’s Social Security number?”

He rubbed his eyes and then threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat. Once again he reached over her shoulder, but this time he clicked on the part of his browser marked Favorites and pointed the sites out to her. “Try this one,” he said, clicking an icon, “and type in his Social Security number in this field.” Then he flopped himself down in one of the chairs across from his desk and started to browse through a pile of newspapers on the floor beside it. “I’m giving you half an hour. And then I’m shutting off the lights and we’re leaving.”

REESE, SHE LEARNED, was a journeyman photographer: capable, but not, from the images she found online, especially gifted. He was probably a better editor, which explained his long tenure in that role with Life magazine. The Web sites she visited suggested that toward the end of his life, he was most likely to be displaying his work in such venues as the meeting room of his church-which he did about a year and a half before he died. She made a mental note to spend a day visiting people from the congregation, beginning with the pastor. She thought she might even attend a worship service that coming Sunday in Bartlett and meet the folks who had known Reese-and, perhaps, his eccentric friend, Bobbie Crocker.

One longer obituary in a photography magazine said that Reese had been a sports photographer back when he’d worked in newspapers, but with the exception of the print of the Hula-Hoopers there hadn’t been any sports shots in that box Bobbie Crocker had left behind-and viewing the Hula-Hoopers as a sports image, she decided, was a stretch. Nothing in Reese’s history suggested the interest in music or jazz or entertainment that marked Crocker’s work, and so-unlike David-she remained confident that Bobbie was responsible for the prints that had been found in his apartment.

The last thing she did before turning to Crocker’s Social Security number was to Google the names Crocker and Marcus Gregory Reese together. She came up empty.

Moreover, her research with Crocker’s Social Security number only left her more frustrated, more puzzled. The number did not in actuality belong to a Robert Buchanan, as she had thought for sure it would. Instead, it was linked to Robert Crocker. Her Bobbie Crocker: He was born in 1923 and he had died, according to the site, earlier that month. In Burlington, Vermont.

Likewise, there was no Social Security number in existence for Pamela’s little brother, which would make complete sense if what she had told Laurel was true: Pamela’s brother had been born before Social Security existed, and-if he had died in 1939 as she insisted-he would have died before he would have been assigned one for the purpose of declaring his income.

Of course, for this very reason the site also couldn’t confirm for her that Buchanan had passed away six and a half decades earlier.

Consequently, the jubilation she had experienced in the carrel at the library all but evaporated. David was not the sort who was ever going to whisper, “I told you so,” but Laurel was feeling silly and small. She still believed that Bobbie Crocker was Pamela’s brother, but she understood when she verbalized that notion that she sounded as delusional as a good many of her clients. She knew there was more she could do with Bobbie’s Social Security number, and she would, but they had already missed their movie and so she agreed to David’s entreaties that they shut down his computer and leave.